From the press release: “Novell, Inc., today announced it has acquired privately held Ximian® of Boston, Mass., the leading provider of desktop and server solutions that enable enterprise Linux adoption. This acquisition expands Novell’s capacity to provide flexible information solutions to customers worldwide. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.” I happen to be a huge Novell and Ximian fan, so I can only imagine what they have in mind…
Novell Acquires Ximian
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Ximian + $$$$ = Better product.
But will still be free?
Novel, is going to try and include MONO in their products. Looks like an old enemy is looking to become an ally….
Hmmmmm… Strange days indeed!
Free? Why does everything have to be free? We do not live in a Utopian society. Companies need to make money and if this helps Novell make money then good for them. I miss the day when Novell was a thorn in Microsoft’s side.
This could cause Novell to be less Windows-centric with their client software. Although support for other platforms does/did exist, it tended to be mediocre (IMHO) in comparison.
I suppose time will tell.
This could be good. Novell is doing more and more in the Linux world. I would love to see a commerical company behind the Mono implementation of C#/.NET.
It probably takes a financial burden off the Ximian folks as well letting them focus more on the coding aspect of things.
Cool for Novell and Linux I think.
At least I was looking at my calender….why does this feel wrong in my gut?
sigh….
maybe novell is going for the gui destop on their server again….
Let’s recap some of Novell’s previous purchases:
Wordperfect – barely breathing
Quattro Pro – dead
Paradox – dead
DR-DOS – dead?
Do we really want one of the strongest Linux groups purchased by Novell? That’s a personal decision. I think not
I just started using XD2 a couple weeks ago and was enormously impressed. I can only imagine what Ximian will be able to do with XD and Evolution now that they’re on firmer financial ground. Assuming, of course, that Novell is still interested in those technologies. This could really be a critical moment for desktop linux…
Everything which is free today, will remain free. Evolution, the desktop, Mono (wooohoo! Go Mono!) are all free software, and there is no way to “take it back”.
Once free, it remains free.
About Mono: yes, Mono will continue expanding and will continue to be developed, as it is very strategically important 😉
Miguel.
This is interesting news indeed. Hopefully they don’t pull a Palm and just gut Ximian for its people and some core technologies.
I would also guess that what they really want is Ximian Connector, and possibly to use Ximian Gnome as the default GUI for their next version of NetWare.
I don’t see a whole lot of use for Mono, but they may just include it anyway, just because they have it.
If the above post is really from Miguel (and I think it is), this is excellent news for open source.
Does Ximian not own the copyright on the items that they have created? If that is the case can’t they be closed in future?
Miguel, is there any chance that Connector will be open-sourced? I’d love to try it out, but I’m not going to pay $70 for the full version without having demo’d it. And yes, I am one of the folks who’ve paid $55 and $20 for Crossover Office and Crossover Plugin, respectively.
-fp
> Does Ximian not own the copyright on the items that they
> have created? If that is the case can’t they be closed in
> future?
Should they change the license in the future, development of the free codebase can continue independently of them. That’s one of the advantages of open source – once freed, it can’t be taken back.
Does Ximian not own the copyright on the items that they have created? If that is the case can’t they be closed in future?
Ximian does own the copyright to things like Mono and evolution I believe. If in doubt…look at the source. Anyway, anything that they’ve GPLed they can’t completely close. They can dual-license in the future, but any modifications to GPLed works have to be made available to anyone who wants them.
The genie’s out of their bottle and it won’t go back.
//Novel, is going to try and include MONO in their products. Looks like an old enemy is looking to become an ally…. //
Why do you say that? Novell has been a Linux ally for a while now. They’ve had a plan to convert to all Linux in place for some time now. They even came out to fight some of SCO’s claims. Tell me again how they were the enemy before this?
[i]Everything which is free today, will remain free. Evolution, the desktop, Mono (wooohoo! Go Mono!) are all free software, and there is no way to “take it back”.
Once free, it remains free.
About Mono: yes, Mono will continue expanding and will continue to be developed, as it is very strategically important 😉
Miguel.</>
Thx Miguel. =)
If they wanted to close the next version of certain software, they would have to find every single line of code that has been made by a contributor, and either rewrite it or ask the contributor to give his ok.
The existing codebase remains under the GPL, and can be continued to be worked on. I doubt though that there will be any problem.
I work for a semi-large company that has a combination of Novell, Microsoft and OS400. They are getting ready to get rid of their Novell stuff and go to “Active Directory”.
I hope (for Novell/Ximian’s sake) this is not a trend representative of the rest of the world. Maybe a move like this can prevent them from losing more customers and even get new ones.
Good luck to all of the Novell and Ximian people who read this.
Darren
Linux keeps getting better and better all the time. Novell’s directory is simply incredible. If they work hard to polish and integrate Ximian’s technologies, Linux will be the easiest to administer os around.
Every day there is a positive development in the free software community. More and better hardware support, the beautiful GNOME and KDE desktops with their host of apps, the wonderful security and configurability of the system. It is days like these that I just want to spend chanting a thank-you mantra to all the developers, documentation writers and to everyone who makes Linux the incredible operating system that it is.
This piece of news just made my day!
That Ximian may give more to Novell that what Novell can give to Ximian.
Think about it. Novell Netware 6.5 has a *really* crap management console, why not purchase the necesssary skills to improve it?
Now, lets add on top of that the fact that Novell doesn’t want to be left out. They have Java, why not add a dot-net compliant framework to the mix so that no matter what the outcome of the framework wars is, Novell will be sitting back with a smile on their face knowing that what ever the outcome, they’re covered either way.
Then lets add ontop of that! there are now *MORE* businesses moving to centralised processing, why not make Novell an viable alternative to Windows? get OpenOffice.org, Ximian GNOME, Evolution etc and you will have a really good combo for the end user.
Add even *MORE* ontop by the fact they Novell will earn some brownie points in the developer circles by embracing openstandards and as a net result, Novell has *NOTHING* to lose and everything to gain from this.
Mono is based on one of Microsoft’s security models. Which means that swiss cheese is equal and as solid and without holes as granit. NOT.
For an example of Microsoft’s “secure” solutions. Check out web sites lately. Or … check out the last two years of security updates which MS has to put out because they don’t have a clue what security really is.
Let’s recap some of Novell’s previous purchases:
Wordperfect – barely breathing
Quattro Pro – dead
Paradox – dead
DR-DOS – dead?
Are you the same one that posted this on slashdot, or someone just copying anothers works? (Based upon timestamps)
I think novell is looking to strengthen their ties with the linux developers. Adding the linux kernel to netware was the first step. Supporting a major opensource project will gather more attention from open source coders. Novell is trying to turn their product line into a community type OS. They are grabbing onto linux because they see it as the future of computing. Novell wants to regain interest in their products by getting open source coders interested in hacking netware.
“It probably takes a financial burden off the Ximian folks as well letting them focus more on the coding aspect of things.”
But now Novell decides what they code and what not.
This looks like a pretty weird purchase as the product lines don’t seem to line up at the moment. I guess Novell could provide the network stuff and Ximian could provide the desktop stuff. Maybe they are thinking a little “grander”. Possibly heavily “managed” desktops where applications are provided over the network (via Mono?). Who knows? It’ll be interesting to see what they have in mind. Hopefully Novell won’t destroy this nice little creative company. Maybe some of that creativity and energy will spread to Novell…
Get over it mate. Sure, Microsofts implementation sucks but their designs and ideas don’t. ActiveX sounds great on paper, however, it didn’t get implemented properly hence the security issues.
For some reason, this doesn’t sit well with me. Ximian seemed to be doing well independently… I’m skeptical of Novell’s interests here and whether or not this is a good thing for the community. Yes, much of Ximian’s code is GPL’d, but there are some critical items (i.e. connector) which I’m afraid may have fallen into cold hands.
*just feeling iffy here* I sincerely hope Novell doesn’t wind up shutting down a good thing.
– me
Mono is based on one of Microsoft’s security models. Which means that swiss cheese is equal and as solid and without holes as granit. NOT.
For an example of Microsoft’s “secure” solutions. Check out web sites lately. Or … check out the last two years of security updates which MS has to put out because they don’t have a clue what security really is.
It’s pretty damn cool to be a Micro-troll isn’t it?
Mono is based only on Microsoft’s specs…most of Microsoft’s security flaws are in the implementation details and not inherent in the design, a clean room implementation will have different security flaws.
Besides, what serious piece of software doesn’t have security updates? (Okay, OpenBSD has only had one hole in the default install in the past 7 years, but there’s not a whole lot you can do with the default install.)
Go to http://packetstormsecurity.nl/ and you’ll see that *GASP* a lot of these advisories are for NON-Microsoft software.
Holy crap, you mean Linux has just as many, if not more security flaws per month?
But it’s not cool to point out those things.
This is what Network Admins are hired for…to apply security patches and make sure the network runs smoothly, because there is nothing that you can safely just “set and forget” in this day and age.
I highly doubt that Novell is looking for a ConsoleOne replacement. No one uses that POS anyway. NWAdmin is a gorgeous and fanastic network management tool.
Now, what would be cool is a full-blown supported Netware Admin for Linux! Or how about the makings of a new user management system for Linux – one that is based on the best NOS out there – Netware, on the Linux kernel, with some of the best UI guys out there – Ximian.
But what future has to offer is pretty uncertain I believe.
It could be that they are just buying an insurance…. we all know MS will dominate desktop for a couple of more years easily before some threat might appear, so this buy has very little effect at the mo’
Let’s be serious : Ximian won’t be for the server desktop.
As a Novell sysadmin, I won’t stress my servers with a destop environment. The RAM of my servers are for the performance. That’s what my use are seeing.
Even if Novell announced taht Netware 7 will ship with either Netware OS or Linux OS as a core at customer choice for the NOS, they won’t put a ximian desktop on it.
The ximian desktop will be for the linux workstations that will be an alternative to windows desktop.
Novell wants Ximian for their engineers, because they are experienced in two areas that are crucial Novell’s long-term survival:
1. Linux integration. Novell’s moving to Linux, and they need all the experience with that platform that they can get. For commercial software, Linux isn’t exactly easy to develop for, due to the hundreds of flavors and dozens of libraries and kernels to write for. Possibly an improved Novell desktop client for Linux may be in the works too.
2. Reverse engineering of Microsoft products/protocols. Between Connector and Mono, Ximian are very experienced with reverse engineering/implementing Microsoft proprietary protocols. Ximian’s knowledge of Microsft Exchange’s protocol could prove extremely useful for providing better interoperability with Microsoft products. Also, Microsoft’s .NET framework isn’t going to go away, MS usually screws up their first two versions of every product rollout, but .NET version 3 will probably be a serious contender. Novell will have to deal with this situation. Also, if Novell were to rewrite their management tools with Mono, they could in theory port these tools across Windows, Linux, and Macintosh with minimal effort, which would be a big selling point.
Just some thoughts.
I just hope for Novell’s sake it’s not to late. I just went through a Microsoft AD course and almost half of the people there were from companies currently using Novell who were swithing over to W2K.
What does this mean for Sun. I thought Ximian was helping Sun get their Gnome desktop in shape.
Many congratulations to the shareholders of Ximian. They will finally see something beyond their salaries as a reward for their hard work.
With yet another large company selling Linux solutions, this only bodes well for the Linux market. Novell has endless work to do in moving all their products to Linux and the Ximian team can certainly help them there.
The Linux market for a neutral email client just got wider as well. How many people will truly want to run “Novell Evolution”? Truly that is an oxymoron if the world has ever heard one. It will make people feel strange just to see the words next to one another.
All in all, a solid move and I hope it turns out well for all involved.
Lets remember a story with Netscape. Maybe this one stop your optimistic reflections?
The Linux market for a neutral email client just got wider as well. How many people will truly want to run “Novell Evolution”?
I truly hope they keep the Ximian brand.
Go Primates!
I truly hope they keep the Ximian brand.
Go Primates!
And what about Novell .Net.
Similar Novell makes summons Microsoft.
…On how far Miguel has come, from the days he founded the GNOME project, to Ximian, to now being a part of Novell. Hope he is not part of a sinking ship here though.
But the GNOME project must be feeling particularly proud. Whatever its naysayers said before, here is some solid enterprise interest in GNOME. We see real business here, and somehow I get a good feeling about this. A few more dollars cannot hurt Ximian. Hope they keep churning out the good stuff.
However, I do hope they make part of their development more community oriented. I seriously hope Evolution, the best mail client in the world, will not suffer from this. I hope they continue committed to the desktop. They have made it a certainly worthwhile experience under Linux.
WoW! I can’t say anything but WoW! This is indeed unexpected and comes as a BomB!
…It is not in Microsofts best interests to sue Ximian/Novell etc over .NET and C# and the rest. Seriously, do you think Microsoft would like to go to court and argue for developer lock-in. I mean, many developers ARE going to go .NET, and if Linux cannot tap into those skills, it is doomed. What (reasonable) young man wants to learn C++ when the majority of Windows apps are being written in C# which makes development faster. If Linux doesn’t understand C#, then developers won’t understand Linux.
Nothing against C++ and C and Java, but who doesn’t want to be able to use their skills if the need arises. Until Linux can command a healthy position in the market where they can make their own thing (A new language, E-something perhaps) become instantly hot, (like 30% of coders use it), we will have to make do with Copying windows in that regard.
I see this as nothing but GREAT news for Linux and Novell. As a Novell/Linux shop already, Novell’s big Linux push is music to my ears. This really must have pissed the folks up in Redmond off somthing aweful.
The new ximian purchase, i believe will guarantee a sweet desktop for novell. I personally never have gotten the chance to use novell. But i think its a great move for the linux community. If we have a company such as novell aquring Ximian, it should boost its revenue seeing how now they can incorporate into there os. Can’t wait to see the Screen shots.
A few months a, Novell CEO had to issue a written apology forcommentng on Linux Kernel. Hope their plans of improving the opensource linux kernel is still on cards
All the same, this is great news, lets see what happens from here……
” I work for a semi-large company that has a combination of Novell, Microsoft and OS400. They are getting ready to get rid of their Novell stuff and go to “Active Directory”. ”
Where I’m getting my degree they are switch over to all Novell servers, at least in the CPSC/Engineering department.
Novell had a survey about using Ximian as a GroupWise client a couple of months ago asking if people expected it for free or would pay for an addon connector for GroupWise.
I think this gives them a very good GroupWise client via Evolution and is a good thing. GroupWise is an awesome backend server and a Linux client is desperately needed (not the Java beta one floating around either).
We do not live in a Utopian society.
Because everything costs so much. At $5/hr. it takes over 70 hours of solid work before I can just afford the OS. Add on top of that compatible document software, calendaring and email wares, developement wares, etc. We’re getting close to 1000 hours of work. Just so I can do everything you take for granted.
Now I have the option to either go in debt for that or save up for months while I live without.
Or I can get it for free from a community that loves people like me. That, to me, is utopia.
Novell is trying to turn their product line into a community type OS.
I am always skeptical when a for-profit corporations suddenly see-the-light and turn open-source. It remains to be seen what type of company they really are. Open Source and capitalism can coexist harmoniously, but either one is not a requirement of the other.
Hmm… a small highly creative company with some big names in software development is bought by a larger company thats slower moving and hasn’t been doing as well as it once had as of late because of microsoft…
Am I the only one who thinks that this will be a situation like apple’s buying out of Next? Where not long down the line the People from Ximian are running the show at Novell?
What (reasonable) young man wants to learn C++ when the majority of Windows apps are being written in C# which makes development faster. If Linux doesn’t understand C#, then developers won’t understand Linux.
Most of the windows apps are beeing written in Visual Basic and ZERO reasonable people wants to “code” in that. And Visual Basic makes development faster.
> Novel, is going to try and include MONO in their products.
> Looks like an old enemy is looking to become an ally….
> Hmmmmm… Strange days indeed!
Nobody notices this funny detail in the header:
By Yaakov Smirnov (IP: —.microsoft.com)
Peoples in Microsoft are fears Novell’s purchase
> Peoples in Microsoft are fears Novell’s purchase
Why? Mono is like air and water, good for everyone: MS, Novell and the Linux community. Maybe Novell is smarter than IBM and they understood that Java has failed.
Linux + Novell + managed interface = not far from longhorn
Most of the windows apps are beeing written in Visual Basic and ZERO reasonable people wants to “code” in that. And Visual Basic makes development faster.
No one wants to. C#/.NET is much better than VB. Which is why MS wants to move ISV’s to it. Do you think Linux doesn’t suffer wuite a bit anyway because there is this mass of VB people who cannot code for Linux because VB is not there. (Not do the OS though. Even Windows isn’t done in .NET) but just user apps where getting them out quick is key.
fuzziping: I believe our site has evaluation versions of the Connector, but I will check internally; Please drop me an e-mail, and I will get back to you with the data.
Mono License: The Mono runtime is dual-licensed and is available under the LGPL or a proprietary license. LGPL means that pretty much everyone can use it, as long as they dont need want to distribute a Mono that has proprietary extensions (some do) or if they want to use the image-linking feature with proprietary software;
The class libraries are under the MIT X11 license and our compilers are under the GPL.
For the components we dual-license we request contributors to give us permission to relicense the code.
As it was previously pointed out: if Ximian stopped publishing new versions of Mono, the Mono community could easily fork the project. That being said, it would be probably one of the most idiotic things you could do with an open source project, but I wanted to cover this particular case.
Anyways, we will continue writing free software, and doing our best to make Mono a great development platform. ObFlamableMaterial: my feelings for the beauty of .NET has not changed.
Tom: yes, we are keeping the Ximian brand, and Rupert, the Ximian monkey. We will now be the Novell Ximian Services (NXS, pretty cool!)
Miguel.
Let’s not forget Delphi here people, there are tons of windows app created with Delphi that blow the doors off anything created with VB.
C# is a great language, and is actually alot like Delphi.
There is also Kylix for Linux which is actually pretty darn good.
i happen to be huge anti ximian and novell guy, and even i am happy. –: ) worms should lurk together. –: ))))
Every change will produce feelings of hope and fear.
I hope this “sudden” change is full of positive feelings and possibilities for both Ximian and Novell and OSS.
Go MONO GO !!!
You can make an non-GPL version of the software you have created, but once released under GPL (or any other software license), it remains that way. Ximian may want to in the future to say “no more contributing open source code”, then so be it. But even then, anyone else can continue what Ximian have been doing,
The trolling got just a tad outta hand recently. Just goes to show how much Eugenia does for this site. Morons like the previous poster would’ve had their IPs banned by now.
Somebody please moderate! Maybe OS News needs some “volunteer” moderators.
I, too, am a huge Novell fan, and a huge anti-Ximian. But I am not happy about this move. I think this is dumb. Mono will go nowhere.
…It is not in Microsofts best interests to sue Ximian/Novell etc over .NET and C# and the rest. Seriously, do you think Microsoft would like to go to court and argue for developer lock-in. I mean, many developers ARE going to go .NET, and if Linux cannot tap into those skills, it is doomed. What (reasonable) young man wants to learn C++ when the majority of Windows apps are being written in C# which makes development faster. If Linux doesn’t understand C#, then developers won’t understand Linux.
You make it sound as though Microsoft likes the idea that Linux will progress. Since most developers as you point out want to work with C#, it would actually be in Microsoft’s interest to keep .Net out of the hands of Linux. Why? Microsoft HATES Linux. They want Linux dead…one way to do that is to keep modern development tools and languages such as the ones Microsoft has developed out of the Linux community.
You are right…”If Linux doesn’t understand C#, then developers won’t understand Linux.” Microsoft would love it if developers would drop Linux development…it would just help MS combat one of their competitors.
Trust me. STARTX is the FIRST thing I take out of autoexec.ncf when I build a box. I don’t much care for ConsoleOne, as it’s a dog, and nwadmin is end of life, and I’m not real crazy about iManage. But, I really don’t care, as I don’t have to manage much with NDS. Now, if I had to manage things as much as you do AD (and yes, I’ve used both, in real-world networks), then I’d be crying about ConsoleOne a lot. But I don’t. I set things, they run, and the network works.
Why they bought Ximian? Maybe for the Linux experience in general, along with the MS experience there…? Make a real Linux client? Make a real OSX client? Make a better Win32 client? Dunno. Hopefully it will help in that area. The server side is solid. As a rock, generally. But the client side has been murky lately, but that’s not to say it doesn’t work, ’cause it does.